The ice cube is the very cornerstone of civilised entertaining, perhaps even of civilisation itself.

Its very presence in your fridge suggests someone who has foresight (you filled the trays), cares about others and pays their electricity bills.

My mother will just about wipe a person who doesn't have ice cubes on hand and, as with her considerable intelligence, compassion and good looks, she has also passed onto me an almost obsessive habit of refilling the trays after they've been emptied of their frozen cargo.

This has bled into other aspects of my entertaining, so you will never attend a party for which I have some degree of responsibility and be served warm beer; in fact there will be reserve bags of clear cubes stacked in the bath, in the laundry and the deep freeze because you can never, ever have too much ice.

So, if we start with ice cubes as the absolute essential to have in your fridge (or freezer) - the one thing no man or woman should be without in their Westinghouse - what then do we add to the list? ...

Got an email from a 30-year-old Tasmanian geologist a few weeks ago who wanted to know what are the demographics of All Men Are Liars' readers.

We had a little bit of a peek at what many of you do for a living, judging by your responses to the post 'The Two Things', where some revealed the stuff you need to know about certain professions and past-times.

Today, I'd like to take it a bit further. Granted, many of you may not care who reads this blog, but after 34 months writing it, more than 140,000 reader comments and tens of millions of page impressions, I'm just a little curious as to who you all are.

I've given you plenty of (admittedly egocentric) detail about my own life, in particular this 5,000 word post answering reader questions back in 2006 ... so, disembodied voices from the ether, now it's your turn ...

The very best habit I have developed in the last 12 months is taking a swim each morning with a bunch of mature-age gentlemen (and women) at my local beach.

Swimming has been a solo pursuit of mine for years; doing laps of pools or the beach, competing in ocean races; it's kept me sane and though I've always thoroughly enjoyed it, there's not a lot of camaraderie to the sport.

That all changed when I started the 9am ritual of meeting the old boys at my surf club, from where we'd wander to the south end of our beach, swim out through the breakers, bob around for a minute or two, then race en masse through shoals of salmon (and whatever is chasing them) to the other side of the bay.

Having this kind of mature, masculine energy around me has become a simple, profound joy for me nowadays, especially because it gives me the opportunity to ask the gents questions about how they've dealt with certain situations in their lives or that of their children ...

I'm pretty sure these ads haven't aired here, but the Mexican beer Dos Equis has been running a great advertising campaign in the US for a couple of years now called The Most Interesting Man in the World.

Some of the copy reads thus: "When it is raining, it is because he is sad. Even his parrot's advice is insightful. If there were an interesting gland, his would be larger than most men's entire lower intestines. His shirts never wrinkle."

"He is left-handed. And right-handed. Even if he forgets to put postage on his mail, it gets there. He once knew a call was a wrong number, even though the person on the other end wouldn't admit it. You can see his charisma from space. He's a lover, not a fighter, but he's also a fighter, so don't get any ideas."

You get the picture. What I find interesting, is that the actor playing The Most Interesting Man in the World, one Jonathan Goldsmith, is obviously in his 50s or 60s, so it's a pretty brave departure for a brewery to lionise a man of advancing years instead of a sporting hero or metrosexual buck.

I'll embed the videos below the jump so you can check them out, but the concept of 'The Most Interesting Man in the World' ads got me thinking ... just who I would bestow that title on in real life? ...

Want to drive them insane? Make them wait without mobile coverage so they can't text or email or tweet.

As a generation we want more of everything now and if we can't have it, we at least want to distract ourselves with ipods or Facebook updates or talkback tripe because otherwise we're left with just us and our thoughts and for many that's more terrifying than driving at 120km/h while texting ...

Some of you may have seen the documentary Solo that aired on the ABC a couple of weeks ago about Andrew McAuley's ill-fated attempt to be the first man to cross the Tasman, paddling 1600km in a kayak.

Directed by Jennifer Peedom and David Michôd, Solo, utilises unsettling footage McAuley shot of himself with a camera mounted to the bow of his kayak. The vessel was recovered a day or so after he disappeared, about 30 nautical miles short of his destination of Milford Sound, New Zealand.

Solo is a distressing yet riveting look at what drove a father and husband to risk, then lose his life attempting something no-one had then achieved and the conflict inherent in McAuley's decision is stunningly captured in this piece of video (jump to the 3:35 mark and let it run).

When I watched the doco with my girlfriend, she said to me "you're never doing something like that" and I agreed; I couldn't understand the why anyone would want to leave behind their lover and family to risk death. Then a few weeks ago, I had the chance to meet and go rock climbing with another stone cold Aussie hellman - Dr Glenn Singleman - and, as I dangled over a 100m high cliff, the mindset of this type of thrill-seeker came into sharp relief ...

When you think about all the competing variables that two people bring to a relationship - likes, dislikes, sexual kinks, baggage, addictions, exes, family and mental issues, children - it's amazing human beings last as couples for days or months, let alone years and decades.

Why then do we constantly heap the condemnation of "failure" on any relationship that ends prior to the death of either party or dissolves before the couple get married?

Just because a person has had a series of respectful six or nine month 'relationettes', does this make them any less accomplished than another who's been stuck in a destructive partnership for five years?

I think the tendency to apply the label of failure to relationships that are anything less than perfect saddles many people with impossible expectations and the result is unhappy couples destined to become unrealistic singles ...

As I've written previously, there's a saying that "every man becomes a feminist when he has a daughter" because suddenly guys see their attitudes and that of their mates through the prism of "that could be my little girl they're talking about."

It's a pity the same perception shift doesn't occur in so many women, with huge numbers of mothers continuing to transmit the trivial obsessions of shoe shopping, beauty products and fashion magazines to their baby girls.

It's a bit much to expect men to take the insoluble issues of western gender equality seriously - things like abortion rights, equal pay and sexual discrimination in the workplace - when millions of intelligent women spend their days consumed with what Gwyneth Paltrow is wearing.

If female opinion makers and power brokers spent a quarter of the time they devoted to worrying about which celebrity woman has had plastic surgery, to an issue like universal free day care - the groundswell of media and community pressure would be overwhelming.

Seriously, put free day care on the front page of every woman's magazine for the next six months and tell me it would not be pushed to the forefront of the national consciousness and to the top of the Federal government's agenda where it rightly should be ...

I'm not in the habit of lifting ideas from other blogs but this one sent to me by reader Elizabeth a few months ago struck me as the perfect Friday distraction, as well as great method for you all to distill your thoughts on your professions, hobbies and other cultural oddities.

Back in 2004, an economist named Glen Whitman recounted on his blog Agoraphilia meeting a stranger at bar who asked him "so, what are the Two Things about economics?"

Unsure what the man meant, Glen asked for clarification and the stranger replied: "You know, the Two Things. For every subject, there are really only two things you need to know. Everything else is the application of those two things, or just not important."

Said Glen: "Oh, okay, here are the Two Things about economics. One: Incentives matter. Two: There's no such thing as a free lunch."

Since then, Glenn has been collecting Two Things by playing the game with people he meets, as I did on a business trip to Melbourne, Wednesday, asking the flight attendant what were the Two Things you had to know about her job.

She thought for a moment and said, "the two things you need to know about being a flight attendant: 1. Safety before service. 2. Have great hair" ...

When you're a boy, there comes a confusing yet thrilling time around age 12 or 13, when you morph from being this sexless "o" floating in gender's alphabet soup, grow a "tail" (♂) so to speak, and become a son of Mars.

Boys have already seen the girls they've grown up with get taller and grow lumps and curves and begin to eye off older dudes. Now the process has started with them, dots join in their heads, the female geometry heaves out of the horizon and suddenly they find themselves forever in The Land of Sex.

Their friends begin talking and lying about it, they can't stop thinking about it and once they get their first girlfriend and some pashing and heavy petting ensues, every thought gets compacted and pushed to the side to give space in their head for ssseeeeeexxxx ...

If you're not living under a bridge talking to fleas, you've probably heard the name Susan Boyle and likely been one of the more than 60 million people worldwide who've viewed her variety show performance on YouTube.

I've been thinking a lot about Susan and the similarities in her story to her predecessor, mobile phone salesman Paul Potts who won the first season of the same reality TV show, Britain's Got Talent.

The thing that made Susan's appearance on the show all the more remarkable was that she faced a hostile audience that openly mocked her, yet she silenced and won them over within four or five bars of her rendition of Les Miserables' 'I Dreamed a Dream'.

Potts faced no such hostility during his audition in 2007 and the reason was he knew his place: he was fat, ugly, poorly dressed, a typical schlub and the look on his face when he fronted the judges was almost pitiful - like he was bracing for the inevitable rejection and bullying that had crowded his youth.

Susan Boyle, however, did not know her place: she was old, fat, ugly, dowdy, unemployed and didn't pluck her eyebrows, yet she had sass, she refused to shuffle meekly onto the stage, her body language said "like it or lump it" ...

Early last month the Prime Minister of Zimbabwe, Morgan Tsvangirai, was injured in a car accident when his four-wheel-drive collided head-on with a lorry near the capital of Harare. His wife of 31 years, Susan Tsvangirai, died at the scene.

I'm not sure what it was about the accounts of her death but it prompted me to do a bit of reading about Susan and Morgan and was soon touched by the obvious strength of their union.

According to The Independent, Morgan first saw Susan in 1976 when he was a foreman at the mines in Bindura and she was visiting an uncle. "He reportedly nudged the friend who was walking next to him and declared 'That is the girl I am going to marry!'"

Since their marriage in 1978, which bore six children, Susan was by all accounts Morgan's rock as the then-opposition leader survived assassination, was imprisoned, endured a lengthy treason trial, was badly beaten and this year was shoe-horned into a power-sharing agreement with his long-time foe President Robert Mugabe.

(According to The Independent, the joke doing the rounds in Zimbabwe says that the reason Tsvangirai was bought into the government was so Mugabe "could shoot him from point blank range.")

I reckon Susan Tsvangirai must have been a pretty remarkable woman, who will be dreadfully missed by her husband and for some reason her story and passing really brought home to me just how traumatic it must be to lose your one and only; the person you were put on this earth to walk with ...

One of the greatest obstacles to human development is when people are surrounded solely by individuals who speak the same vocabulary, who share the same assumptions. They start to mistake their fragment of experience as humanity's complete reality.

You see this in all walks of life, from in-bred villages, to entire nations, professions, philosophies, religions, the scientific community, even groups of mates who've sat around the pub since their teens and decided beyond a shadow of a doubt that "this is how the world works and anyone who disagrees is a bloody idiot."

I'm sure you've all been in a conversation or argument with someone and been absolutely nonplussed about how they can believe what they're saying - and sure as anything, they're thinking exactly the same thing about you.

As I've written previously, "we all live in our own movie, shot from our point of view, and we're all absolutely convinced of the veracity of the script we're reading from: our experience of life. Any argument we have with someone is therefore just a glorified pissing contest - our perspective versus theirs - yet so many of us spend hours, careers, wars and marriages trying to prove our stream of urine is clearer, hotter, stronger and goes higher in the air than that of the next person."

The question for today's post is how do we change someone's mind when we have to? How do you generate accord in the face of a competing belief system? And how does one go about opening the mind of a person who doesn't even realise that it's closed? ...

In this fast-paced go-go world of ours some issues are too important to be left to the ham-fisted, half-arsed witless hysterics of so-called web journalism. But that's too bad. Because that's all John Birmingham has. He's unfair, unreasonable and often unbalanced but in a good way. Words are weapons, and this weapon is a Blunt Instrument.

What makes this city tick? And what need be said, no SHOUTED, to keep it ticking in a true direction? Well-versed wordsmith Rupert McCall rides the undercurrent of a passionate notion all the way to the answers. Rhyme or reason? He'll let you be the judge...

The Magic Spray is a Monday sports column that affronts your senses like Dencorub to the groin. Like its real-life counterpart that's cured countless corked thighs, it may leave you feeling slightly numb, dulling the pain of another working week.

Mother, wife, housekeeper and family diplomat Heidi Davoren does a lot of laundry. She can peg a line full of undies quicker than George Bush can duck a flying shoe. For those of you who battle the mundane and ridiculous on a daily basis – school fees, preservatives, family budgets, soiled pants and banana stains – gorge on guilt-free parenting advice here.

For those who think gossip is a dish best served scalding, there's no need to wade through the magazines or cyberspace for the grittiest pop culture news. Because Georgia Waters has done that for you. She takes the celebrity world for the madness that it truly is. And it's enough to make a starlet choke on her silver spoon.

It's the blog that tackles the serious issues that impact on the lives of Queenslanders. We'll take on the bureaucracy; question and challenge the decision makers; put pressure on the movers and shakers and stick up for the little guy.

Babes in Business are Brisbane women that stand out in a crowd. Not only are they business owners, entrepreneurs, movers and shakers, they are wives, girlfriends, mothers, sisters and daughters. They'll give working women throughout the city the best tips on striking the balance between work and home life.

Regarded as history’s best female surfer, Layne Beachley is a seven-time world champion. But her drive doesn’t stop at the water’s edge. She's had success with her Beachley Athletic and in 2006, Layne staged the richest event in women’s surfing. Recently retired, Layne has turned her focus to investing in Australia’s future by inspiring young women to realise their full potential with her Aim For The Stars Foundation.

Sam de Brito has spent more than a decade writing for TV, film and newspapers. In his first book, No Tattoos Before You’re Thirty, he offers advice to his unborn children. In his latest offerings, The Lost Boys and Building a Better Bloke, he takes the pulse of Aussie manhood. Now it’s your turn as he expounds on the business of being a bloke.

James Cameron has been designing menswear for the past decade. In this time he has witnessed more than his fair share of trends and fashions, most of which should never have involved men, but men and fashion should not be mutually exclusive. There are a few guidelines every man should know and follow and still hold on to their masculinity.

Have a computer or IT problem or issue? Then just Ask Chris Thomas! Chris Thomas founded Westnet in 1994, and today runs Technical Support for the mid-tier Internet Service Provider. Chris has helped Westnet win countless awards for customer service in the ISP space.

Clive Dorman is one of Australia’s most experienced travel journalists. Every week for 17 years his column Travellers’ Check dealt with travel consumer issues. His weekly column now returns online looking at travel intelligence: where the value is, what to do, using the collective information-gathering of you.

Categories

Latest comments

ironmike on Reveal yourself:single male - 38
Brisbane
Journalism/PR
I like AMAL because it gives me the chance to bag women, as they truly dese...more